The Apollo Murders

All flying machines were essentially the same; you just had to figure out how to get them started and how they wanted to kill you.

Until you have suffered much in your heart, you cannot learn humility.

When the third-stage motor shut off, the spacecraft was suddenly weightless, orbiting around the Earth. The little metal orb drifted gently up from its resting place, becoming a tiny conductive balloon in a playground of circuitry.

The air pressure inside the cabin had dropped steadily, as planned, during launch, and was now holding at one-third of what it had been in Florida. The gases in everyone’s guts had expanded, and all three of them were farting.

A spaceship is, in essence, a bubble of Earth’s air in the empty vacuum of space.

He pointed out the Spacecraft Center, and then Seabrook and Kemah as they crossed the Galveston Bay shoreline.

He smiled. Scientists do love Volkswagens!

It was a Rube Goldberg contraption that someone had once said looked like a flying bedstead. The nickname had stuck. The Bedstead had a jet engine that pointed straight up, and hydrogen peroxide thrusters mounted at all angles on an ungainly aluminum frame.

Transit time back to Earth would be three days — lots of opportunity to sort out a plan. For now, though, she was locked inside this small place with a man she couldn’t trust. A man she’d fired her gun at twice, and who’d latched the door with her outside. First step was to survive this night, on the surface of the Moon.

The bird strike hadn’t only cost Kaz an eye. Without binocular vision, he’d lost his medical as both a test pilot and an astronaut selectee who’d been assigned to fly on MOL, the military’s planned Manned Orbiting Laboratory spy space station. His work and dreams had disappeared in a bloody flurry of feathers.

We therefore commit Captain Luke Hemming’s body to the depths of space, to be turned into corruption, looking for the resurrection of the body, when the Universe shall give up her dead, and the life of worlds to come, through our Lord Jesus Christ. Who at his coming shall change our vile body, that it may be like his glorious body, according to the mighty working, whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself.